Kerry Noonan is 50 years old and the father of eight
children. He grew up in and around New York City, and then after living in various
other places, including Steubenville, where he met his wife, he moved to Grand
Haven, a resort town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. His wife grew up
there, the daughter of three generations of pharmacists, and Kerry started
working for his father-in-law, and then for the firm that bought out his
father-in-law’s institutional pharmacy. The job involved a lot of driving, and
the driving began to take a toll on Kerry’s hip. The long drives and low pay
allowed Kerry to meditate on economic matters.

As a classic ethnic Catholic, Kerry understood the
importance of wages in America. As someone who came on the scene on the East
Coast during the high noon of decent wages in America, he could remember how
people like his father could raise a family in a place like New York on the
salary paid by an ordinary job. He could also see that America slipping away
day by day, as his children neared college age, under the hammer blows of the
pro-Capitalist propaganda that began in earnest in 1979, when the Fed under
Paul Volcker, England under Margaret Thatcher and the U.S. presidency of Ronald
Reagan, created the perfect Capitalist storm. Usury reared its ugly head; the
Fed raised interest rates to 20 percent, killing any incentive for legitimate
investment, and Wall Street descended into an orgy of leveraged buy-outs that
gutted the manufacturing infra-structure of once great industrial powers like
England and the United States, and the legacy of all that was low wage jobs for
blue collar Catholics like Kerry Noonan.

To make matters worse, as Kerry drove from town to town in
Michigan and Indiana, he could take morbid delectation from the fact that
Catholics were not only the main victims of the drive to destroy manufacturing
jobs and drive down wages, they were the chief propagandists for this campaign
as well. Michael Novak began the trend when he went to work for the Jews who
ran the American Enterprise Institute. The fruit of that wicked collaboration
was The
Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, a pro-Capitalist screed that makes Ayn
Rand’s rants seem judicious and measured by comparison.

In his classic Catholicism,
Protestantism and Capitalism, a book which he wrote around the time of
Pope Pius’s XI’s celebration of Catholic economics, Quadragesimo
Anno, Amintore Fanfani claimed that “there is an unbridgeable gulf
between the Catholic and the capitalistic conception of life.” If that claim
falls on deaf ears these days, especially among Catholics, the main reason is
Michael Novak, “the man,” according to the I H S editors of Fanfani’s book,
“who has come to represent all that Catholic thought has to say on economic
subjects.” If there is one man responsible for ignorance of and hostility
toward Catholic social teaching, especially among Catholics, it is Michael
Novak. If most Catholics think that Quadragesimo Anno is a hunchback who
lives in the bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the main reason for
that misunderstanding is Michael Novak.

Novak’s book appeared when Kerry was still in college. He
was in no position to critique it then because he was too young, too involved
in sports and other pursuits, and, most importantly, intellectually disarmed by
his father’s involvement in New York conservatism. Kerry’s father was a charter
subscriber to National Review, and Kerry was raised to believe that “in
politics and the Church the Buckley family represented the good and the Kennedy
family represented the evil.”

By the time he reached his adult years, Kerry realized that
this was a grotesque distortion of the situation confronting American
Catholics. The conservatives were dissenters before the liberals were. Or, as
he put it:

Organized and notorious public dissent to the Magisterium
not only predated the council but was initiated by William F. Buckley and National
Review. In 1961, Pope John XXIII issued the encyclical Mater et Magistra. The
National Review response, “Mater, si; Magistra, no” was a mocking and sarcastic
denial of the Church’s authority to teach on matters of faith and morals if
that teaching contradicted the libertarian ideas of the National Review
editors. Dissenters of this sort were often proud of their religious orthodoxy
but blind to their disloyalty to the fullness of the Church’s social teaching.

As he drove around southwestern Michigan and northwestern
Indiana trying to ignore the pain in his hip and wondering how he was going to
come up with college tuition for his oldest child, Kerry could try to deaden
the pain by listening to the radio, in particular Catholic talk radio of the
sort broadcast by EWTN. But Kerry was to get no consolation from fellow
Catholics, certainly not on economic issues, because the go-to guy for
explaining the Church’s teaching on economics was none other than Father Robert
Sirico, head of the Acton Institute of Grand Rapids, and a member of Kerry’s own
diocese.

For those of you who still don’t know, Robert Sirico,
another ethnic Catholic from New York, began his public career as a flaming
homosexual activist. The late Thomas J. Herron brought out Sirico’s career as
a homosexual crusader, social revolutionary and performer of gay “marriage”
ceremonies in two articles, one of which appeared in Culture Wars in
2005 and another which appeared in 2007.

Shortly after becoming Executive Director of the Los Angeles
Gay Community Center, in whose parking lot he shared a joint with Jane Fonda,
Sirico made “gay” history when, on 12 April 1975, he performed the first same
sex “marriage” in the United States of two male homosexuals with a civil
marriage license at the First Unitarian Church of Denver, Colorado.

One year later Rev. Sirico dressed in a black clerical suit
with a Roman collar, made the pages of the Seattle Post Intelligencer
under the headline “Male Slave Mart Raid in LA called a Mistake.” On April 10,
1976 Los Angeles policemen dressed in riot gear arrested 40 persons
participating in a homosexual “slave market” held at the Mark IV Health Club in
Hollywood. The bathhouse was operated by a sadomasochist cult called the
Leather Fraternity. Nude “male slaves” were led on stage by an auctioneer and
inspected by potential buyers. “Slaves” went for $10 to $75. The undercover
policeman at the auction told the press that he picked up a man for $16
following assurances from the auctioneer that the “volunteer for charity” would
perform specific sex acts on him. The event was sponsored by the Los Angeles
Gay Community headed by Rev. Sirico, who told the PI reporter that the
Los Angeles Police Department was “out to get” the gay community. Rev. Sirico
called the event a “harmless fund-raising event” staged to raise money for the
Center’s venereal disease clinic.[1]

Shortly after defending the Male Slave Mart in Los Angeles,
Sirico moved to San Francisco, where he converted to Libertarianism and became
a spokesman for Libertarians for Gay Rights. Herron claims that by 1976 Sirico:

felt that a new philosophy was needed to enhance
homosexual liberation rather than the, by now, stale left-wing ranting about
“police brutality.” The more thoughtful gay leaders would come to realize that
there is a philosophy known as libertarianism that stated that the state had no
authority in private exchanges between individuals, and so gay activists would
be drawn to the libertarianism that serendipitously was developing an
intellectual base in another California city, San Francisco, during the late
‘70s. Like many homosexuals in San Francisco in the mid- to late ‘70s, Sirico
converted to Libertarianism because it was compatible with homosexuality, not
because it was compatible with “the Christian faith,” much less Catholicism,
which it is not.

On one of the already mentioned Catholic radio shows, Kerry
heard Father Sirico condescendingly dismiss Pope Francis as “confused” on
economic matters. Sirico’s attack on Pope Francis was only the most recent of a
long list of pronouncements whose goal was undermining the Catholic Church’s
teachings on economics. The modern rebirth of that teaching began in 1891 when
Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum
Novarum. During his long drives delivering drugs, Kerry could listen to
Father Sirico promoting his new book Defending
the Free Market, during which he could hear the tenets of Catholic
Social Teaching trashed by the Roman-collar-wearing homosexual, libertarian,
devotee of Austrian School economics who ran the Acton Institute. Kerry learned
from listening to Father Sirico flog his new book that private property is
“sacred,” but when it comes to labor, the regnant principle is “creative
destruction,” which Sirico defines as

the phenomenon whereby old skills, companies, and
sometimes entire industries are eclipsed as new methods and businesses take
their place. Creative destruction is seen in layoffs, downsizing, the
obsolescence of firms, and sometimes the serious injury to the communities that
depend on them. It looks horrible. . . .[2]

In fact, it is horrible, but only if you’re the one who lost
his job. Sirico is in favor of a “a truly free labor market” because “a truly
free labor market”[3]
means one where the workers cannot organize into unions or engage in collective
bargaining. Or as Sirico puts it: “Barring interventions by regulators and
union officials, workers negotiate their own terms of employment to their
advantage.”

In the middle of the publicity campaign promoting his book,
Father Sirico got involved in union busting at Duquesne University, claiming in
the New York Times that “the importance of unions in Catholic teaching
is historically contingent.”

“It matters,” Father Sirico continued, “that Pope Leo XIII’s
Rerum Novarum was written in 1891, not today. In the industrial revolution, the church was concerned about communism,
and not just capitalism but savage capitalism.” Father Sirico went on to say
that, “People were being brutalized. That’s just not the case in Pittsburgh
today.” Given his track record as a subverter of the moral law, it
should come as no surprise that Father Sirico’s views on labor and unions are
the opposite of what the Catholic Church teaches. The views Sirico expressed in
his book and in the New York Times contradicted the Compendium of
Social Doctrine of the Church, which claims in section 305 that: “The
Magisterium recognizes the fundamental role played by labour unions, whose
existence is connected with the right to form associations or unions to defend
the vital interests of workers employed in the various professions (italics
in original).”

“A truly free labor market” is a non-negotiable demand with
the Acton Institute because is it a non-negotiable demand for the Calvinists
who fund it—people like Betsy DeVos, who famously claimed in an April 2004
press release, “Many, if not most, of the economic problems in Michigan are a
result of high wages and a tax and regulatory structure that makes this state
un-competitive.” Unlike Betsy DeVos, Adam Smith felt that high wages were an incentive
to productive labor. Unlike Adam Smith, Sirico favors “low-paying factory
jobs,” because they “may represent the best and brightest opportunity the poor
have. . . .”[4]
Which would be the case if Betsy DeVos were allowed to run the economy.

Again those who are looking for coherence and consistency in
Sirico’s book Defending the Free Market will continue to look in vain
because the same man who is in favor of “low paying factory jobs” favors
unlimited salaries for CEOs.[5]
“Caps on income are counterproductive,” Sirico tells us, “if what we want is
more for the poor” without reminding us that he is in favor of caps on income
when it comes to the poor.

When it comes to the economy (except of course when it comes
to the property of the rich, which is “sacred”), Sirico wants to let “creative
destruction” reign. That means that GM should be free to terminate
manufacturing jobs in Flint, Michigan and free to re-locate their plants to
Mexico, where they can pay their workers $1 an hour, but that workers should not
organize because that would interfere with “a truly free labor market.”

After listening to Father Sirico promoting laissez-faire
Austrian School economics ad nauseam on one radio show after another,
Kerry Noonan couldn’t take it any more. On January 14, 2014, he wrote to Bishop
David Walkowiak, Ordinary of the Diocese of Grand Rapids, to complain about
Father Sirico’s deliberate subversion of the Church’s teaching on economics.
“The willfulness and deviations of [this] dissident priest,” Kerry wrote, “are
a source of much danger to the faithful. The Acton Institute has become a
powerful influence but an abusive one. Something must be done. . . .”

Seven months later, Bishop Walkowiak responded to Kerry’s
letter by claiming that the Church had no teaching on economics. “The pope,”
Walkowiak wrote, “is not an economist. The Church is authoritative in faith and
morals, not economics. There are ethical dimensions to economics and every
sector of society. The pope acts as a pastor and guide in these areas.”

Did anyone ever say that the pope was an economist? Kerry
Noonan certainly did not when he wrote his respectful letter to Bishop
Walkowiak, nor did he merit a sneering, condescending response of this sort.
Pope Pius XI never claimed that his predecessor Pope Leo XIII was “an
economist,” when he launched modern Catholic social teaching with Rerum
Novarum, but lacking a degree in economics did not prevent Leo XIII from
“passing judgment on the modern economic regime.”[6]

Bishop Walkowiak then went on to defend capitalism by
claiming that the Church has never condemned it, forgetting again (if he ever
knew) that Pope Pius XI commended Rerum Novarum precisely because “it
boldly attacked and overthrew the idols of liberalism.”[7]

And what was this liberalism? Was Pius XI referring to the
political agenda of Teddy Kennedy? No, he was referring to the philosophical
justification of laissez faire capitalism that had become dogma in the
English-speaking world and most of Europe by the end of the 19th
century. By the time of the Irish Potato Famine of 1847, laissez faire
Capitalism had become so abusive, that a reaction was inevitable. Pope Pius XI
recognized this when he wrote, “the parent of this cultural socialism was
liberalism, and that its offspring will be bolshevism.” Rerum Novarum,
according to Pope Pius XI “completely overthrew those tottering tenets of
liberalism which had long hampered effective interference by the government.”[8] When Leo XIII
wrote Rerum Novarum, “rulers of not a few nations were deeply infected with
liberalism and regarded such unions of working men with disfavor, indeed with
open hostility.”

Bishop Walkowiak’s gives lip service to Pope Francis’s
attempts to revive Catholic Social Teaching when he writes:

Pope Francis’s view on economics remains a hot topic. In
his post synodal exhortation, The
Joy of the Gospel, the Pope does not say that capitalism is an
unacceptable economic system. We know from Saint John Paul II’s teaching in the
social encyclical Centesimus
Annus, that such an interpretation is far from the truth.

Bishop Walkowiak’s views on economics derive from Michael
Novak’s attempt to revive the defunct ideology of liberalism in The Spirit
of Democratic Capitalism, not the Church’s social teaching. According to
Novak’s reading of Centesimus Annus, the Church finally endorsed
Capitalism after a century of viewing it with suspicion in encyclicals like Rerum
Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. According to this view, the Church
repudiated Leo XIII’s condemnation of the “idols of liberalism,” But the actual
text on capitalism in Centesimus Annus is far from a ringing endorsement
of Capitalism. In fact, any approval is conditional.

Sensitive to the new situation which the fall of communism
brought about in the early 1990s, Pope John Paul II tried to define the term
Capitalism in Centesimus Annus, the encyclical celebrating the one
hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that launched
modern Catholic social thought on economics. Sirico mentions Centesimus
Annus repeatedly but he never cites the pope’s attempt to define the key
term at the heart of the discussion. Taking note of the semantic issue
surrounding the term “Capitalism,” the pope attempted to answer the question,
Is Capitalism “the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the
Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil
progress?” by defining his terms:

If by “capitalism” is meant an economic system which
recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private
property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well
as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly
in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak
of a “business economy,” “market economy” or simply “free economy.”

But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in
the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework
which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees
it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and
religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

Nine years after Centesimus Annus and following the
repeal of the Depression era Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, Capitalism as
practiced at the casino known as Wall Street became, without any shadow of a
doubt, “a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed
within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human
freedom in its totality.” That is why the market collapsed in 2008. Now in
light of the crash of 2008 it’s time to define Capitalism in terms of what it
has become when all restraints holding it back from its penchant for wretched
excess were removed.

Capitalism, according to Heinrich Pesch, SJ, is
state-sponsored usury. Is usury still a sin? Is usury even a problem? It is if
you’re Kerry Noonan and faced with the prospect of higher education for your
children and the life-long debt slavery that student loans now entail. Where is
a Catholic wage earner supposed to turn for guidance in economic matters, if
not to his bishop?

It’s time to admit that we are going to get no help in this
project from intellectual prostitutes at places like the Acton Institute, who
feed at the troughs of the capitalist foundations and think tanks and produce
economic fairy tales for the goyim to keep them in ignorance of what is
really going on. Recklessly ignoring caveats like those made by the pope,
Robert Sirico has tried for years now to resurrect the failed package of zombie
ideas known as Capitalism by a series of rhetorical flourishes with no logical
framework supporting them.

Bishop Walkowiak’s letter has made it clear that Catholics
like Kerry Noonan can’t turn to their bishops for guidance on economic matters
either because the mind of the American bishops has been colonized by
foundation-funded prostitutes.. The American bishops are like the “practical
men” criticized by John Maynard Keynes. They “believe themselves to be quite
exempt from any intellectual influences” but “are usually slaves of some
defunct economist,”[9]
like, say, Michael Novak or Robert Sirico.

Bishop Walkowiak ended his letter by telling Kerry that
Father Robert Sirico “is a priest in good standing in the Diocese of Grand
Rapids, “where he serves as pastor.” “As for the Acton Institute,” the bishop
concluded, “I am reading material which the Institute has sent me so that I can
better understand their aims.”

That a bishop would go along with Sirico’s attempts to
subvert Catholic Social Teaching is more than demoralizing; it is scandalous.
Kerry was both disheartened and outraged by the bishop’s response which he
defended the “arrogance, ignorance, and denials” of think tanks like the Acton
Institute and the American Enterprise Institute and the Catholic prostitutes
who write for them.

Kerry Noonan has a right to be angry. His son is now faced
with the unenviable prospect of crushing debt or no higher education.
Universities like Notre Dame were created to provide quality, low-cost,
Catholic education to the children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants like
Kerry’s grandparents. After allowing Catholic colleges and universities to become
cesspools of sexual vice in the wake of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh’s Land o’ Lakes
statement, the American bishops now sit by passively as a whole new generation
of Catholics becomes enslaved to usury because of the massive debt that they
must accrue in order to get a Catholic education.

It now costs $60,000 a year to attend Notre Dame University.
Where is a Catholic wage earner like Kerry Noonan supposed to come up with that
kind of money for an education? The answer is simple. The answer is usury. His
children need to borrow the money. Kerry could send his children to cut-rate
local colleges, which would cut his children’s tuition in half, but $120,000 in
debt is still a formidable burden, especially in today’s job market.

If Kerry’s son ended up $100,000 in debt, he would need an
annual salary of $91,600.80 to be able to afford to repay this loan. This
estimate assumes that 10 percent of his gross monthly income will be devoted to
repaying his student loans. This corresponds to a debt-to-income ratio of 1.1.
According to the web-based Loan Calculator, “If you use 15 percent of your
gross monthly income to repay the loan, you will need an annual salary of only
$61,067.20, but you may experience some financial difficulty.”[10]

This is especially bad news because the starting salary for
graduates with bachelor’s degrees is nowhere near the $91,600.81 that Loan
Calculator specifies as adequate to repay this relatively modest loan. The
average starting salary for a teacher in the state of Indiana, the kind of job
you can get with just a bachelor’s degree, is $33,574.[11] That means that
your salary is roughly half of what it needs to be to repay your student loan
debt even if you’re willing to suffer “some financial difficulty” in repaying
it.

But let’s assume that Kerry’s son has decided to go to Notre
Dame for both his undergraduate and law degrees. Given this career path, his
education at Notre Dame at current prices would cost $452,440. If he were to
borrow the money at 8 percent, which is the current rate for Federal PLUS loans
and private loans, for 20 years, he would have a cumulative payment of
$910,262.28, of which $456,822.28 would be interest on that loan. That’s
assuming, of course, that he makes his monthly payment of $3,784.39 on time
every month for 20 years. If he falls behind in his payment, our law student
will end up paying off a floating loan, which, if amortized over his entire
working career, i.e., 40 years, will come out to a cumulative payment of
$1,513,358.26 of which $1,059,000 will be interest.

In order to pay off his student loan without financial
distress, Kerry’s son would have to earn at least $454,126.80 per year from the
moment he leaves school and keep earning that salary for the next 20 years in order
to pay off his loan. That’s not good news because “the national median for 2010
law school grads working full time” was $63,000.[12] The bad news is
compounded when we learn that the starting salary for lawyers has declined by
20 percent since 2009, largely because of the recession and the fact that most
students feel that they have to get high paying jobs at law firms in order to
justify the cost of college education. The bad news gets worse. Even if Kerry’s
son dedicates 15 percent of his gross monthly income to repay the loan and is
willing to “experience” the “financial difficulty” that that entails, he will
still need an annual salary of $302,751.20 to juggle a loan payment of this
size with other expenses, like food and rent.

Since the average starting salary for someone entering the
legal profession is $63,000 (as of 2010), our young lawyer will be earning only
one-fifth of what he needs to earn in order to make his loan payment every
month, even at the “experience some financial difficulty” level. That means
that he will probably fall behind on his payments. If that happens, his loan
will become, in effect, a floating loan, one which he will never pay off, one
which will stay with him until the day he dies, which brings us to Scenario #4,
which is the same terms as Scenario #3 but calculated over 40 years, which is
to say, the lawyer’s entire working career. It is impossible to calculate all
of the variables involved in a loan that does not get paid back on time, so we
will assume, somewhat unrealistically that our lawyer will struggle to repay
the loan and finally succeed after 40 year of heroic effort.

The good news is that, as with all long-term loans, the
monthly payments are lower. Kerry’s son will only have to come up with a
monthly payment of $3145.87 as opposed to $3,784.39. As a result he can get by
with earning only $377,504 a year or $251,669.60, if he is willing to
experience financial difficulty. The bad news, of course, is that he will have
to pay back $1,510,011.36 over the term of the loan or a whopping $1,057,571.35
in interest.

In other words, the amount Kerry’s son would have to pay
back for a Notre Dame education is greater than the $1.4 million a college
graduate can expect to earn during his lifetime. Lawyers, of course, probably earn
more than the average college graduate, but even lawyers have to eat and have a
place to sleep, something they will not be able to do if they have to dedicate
practically every dollar they earn to repaying student loans.

Instead of dealing with the issue of debt slavery, Bishop
Walkowiak endorses “the idols of liberalism,” as expounded by Father Sirico and
the Acton Institute. When Bishop Walkowiak claims that “the Pope is not an
economist,” does this mean that the Pope Benedict XIV was wrong when he condemned
usury in Vix Pervenit? Is Vix Pervenit part of the Magisterium of
the Catholic Church? Is Rerum Novarum part of that same Magisterium? If
so, then Father Sirico cannot be a priest in good standing because his entire
career as a priest has been based on the subversion of Church teaching.

Far from ending the discussion, Bishop Walkowiak’s letter
raises more questions than it answers. It’s clear that a new wind is blowing
from Rome. The pope and Cardinal Rodriguez of Tegucigalpa, his right hand man,
are open in their criticism of capitalism, whose pernicious effects are
exponentially worse in third-world countries like Honduras. In addition to
condemning Capitalism, the pope has also shown himself willing to intervene
when he feels that a bishop is not doing his job. The pope’s intervention into
the management of the Vatican Bank is one example of what I’m talking about.
The case of the Bling Bishop in Germany is another. On October 23, 2103 Bishop
Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst was suspended from his post as bishop of Limburg
for cost overruns on the renovation of diocesan facilities. Six months later,
on March 26, 2014, the pope accepted Bishop Tebartz-van Elst’s resignation.[13] Is allowing the
subversion of Catholic Social Teaching less of an offense than spending too
much money on a bathtub? If that is not the case, then hasn’t Bishop Walkowiak
forced the Vatican’s hand by refusing to act against Sirico and the Acton
Institute, both of which are notorious in Rome? Why is a man who spent his
earlier career as a promoter of sodomy and his current career as a promoter of
usury a priest in good-standing in the Catholic Church? Aren’t sodomy and
withholding the wages of the worker sins that cry to heaven for vengeance?
Even Wikipedia knows that much Catholic theology.[14] How can a priest
who has made a career of promoting two of the four sins that cry to heaven for
vengeance be a priest in good standing in the Catholic Church? Does the Church
stand for anything anymore? Is Rome willing to act when the local bishop isn’t?
Is paying too much for a bathtub worse than condoning sins that cry to heaven
for vengeance?

The story of Kerry Noonan and his bishop shows how desperate
the situation is. It didn’t happen overnight. It’s been building for over 30 years.
Thanks to people like Michael Novak, Robert Sirico, and Robbie George, the
entire American Church and large swathes of the Vatican have been conned into
thinking that the Church has no mandate to pronounce on economic matters. The
main problem, at least in Rome, is not lack of will. It is lack of intellectual
support. Catholic academe has been totally corrupted on both the sexual and
economic fronts. The professors who used to get bought off by sexual liberation
have been replaced by a cadres of colleagues who have been, quite literally,
bought off by money from the Acton Institute, The American Enterprise
Institute, The Atlas Foundation, the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and
a host of others too numerous to mention.

This is why I wrote Barren Metal.
It is not only the most definitive history of economics written from a Catholic
perspective; it is the only history of Catholic economics written from a
Catholic perspective. It is based on Heinrich Pesch’s Lehrbuch
der Nationaloekonmie, which as its title indicates is a teaching
guide—some have called it a Summa Economica—but not a history.

Barren Metal is, among other things, the story of the
rise and fall of economics as the self-regulating mechanism. It is the story of
the rise of capitalism as the regime of state-sponsored usury. It is the story
of the awakening of the German mind in the face of this threat and the creation
of the Germanic-Catholic alternative to the English Newtonian model of
economics as pseudo-physics. It is the story of the theft of labor.

On one of his walks through Paris, Honore de Balzac, the French
novelist, encountered the richest man in France strolling arm in arm with
Heinrich Heine, the revolutionary who did his best to overthrow Capitalism
during the Revolution of 1848. Viewed from a political or an economic
perspective the two men should have been on opposite sides of the revolutionary
barricades, but Balzac was smart enough to see that ethnic blood ran thicker
that political water, no matter how turbulent. Heine the Revolutionary and
Rothschild the financier could walk arm in arm because both men were Jews and
because together they embodied “tout l’esprit et tout l’argent des Juifs.”

In America, both the spirit and the money come together at
think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. Rich Jews funding
revolutionary Jews and their movements is nothing new. Jacob Schiff funded the
Bolsheviks. Lloyd Blankfein supports gay marriage, the prime Jewish
revolutionary movement in our day. Rich Jews, like David Rubenstein, co-founder
of the Carlyle Group, fund the American Enterprise Institute, which paid for
Michael Novak’s book. That book has corrupted the mind of every single
American bishop, if not directly then through initiatives like the Manhattan
Declaration, orchestrated by Robbie George, another mouth that feeds at the AEI
trough.

I cannot change the moral fiber of American bishops, but,
with your help, I can provide the men of good will in the hierarchy and ethnic
Catholics like Kerry Noonan with the Catholic antidote to the lies of Robert
Sirico.

The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit was a runaway
best-seller. Because of the inexorable law of supply and demand, it ended up
selling for $1,000 a copy on Amazon. That book, however, tells only half the
story. It tells the story of Heinrich Heine but not the story of James
Rothschild or his brothers. Barren Metal completes what The Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit began.

Garrick Small is a professor of economics at Queensland
University in Australia. After reading Barren Metal, he said:

The more I read of what you are doing the more it is
apparent that all the time I spent reading the history of economic thought was
an almost total waste of time. In that enterprise students grapple with the
theories of this person or that without ever plumbing the political environment
that motivated them or the philosophical context in which they worked. The
result is a study of red herrings. The relations between the Jews and the
German people in the century up to World War I is a topic that is conspicuously
absent from contemporary western education. The importance of your project
continues to impress me.

If a professor of economics feels this way about Barren
Metal, just think what bishop might learn by reading it. Just think of what
a whole nation of Kerry Noonans armed with Barren Metal might do.

Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict
between Labor and Usury, $69 +
S&H. (When ordering for shipment outside the United States, the price will
appear higher to offset increased shipping charges.)